Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (154 page)

Next morning MacWhirr stood before them unperturbed, having travelled from London by the midnight express after a sudden but undemonstrative parting with his wife. She was the daughter of a superior couple who had seen better days.

“We had better be going together over the ship, Captain,” said the senior partner; and the three men started to view the perfections of the Nan-Shan from stem to stern, and from her keelson to the trucks of her two stumpy pole-masts.

Captain MacWhirr had begun by taking off his coat, which he hung on the end of a steam windless embodying all the latest improvements.

“My uncle wrote of you favourably by yesterday’s mail to our good friends — Messrs. Sigg, you know — and doubtless they’ll continue you out there in command,” said the junior partner. “You’ll be able to boast of being in charge of the handiest boat of her size on the coast of China, Captain,” he added.

“Have you? Thank ‘ee,” mumbled vaguely MacWhirr, to whom the view of a distant eventuality could appeal no more than the beauty of a wide landscape to a purblind tourist; and his eyes happening at the moment to be at rest upon the lock of the cabin door, he walked up to it, full of purpose, and began to rattle the handle vigorously, while he observed, in his low, earnest voice, “You can’t trust the workmen nowadays. A brand-new lock, and it won’t act at all. Stuck fast. See? See?”

As soon as they found themselves alone in their office across the yard: “You praised that fellow up to Sigg. What is it you see in him?” asked the nephew, with faint contempt.

“I admit he has nothing of your fancy skipper about him, if that’s what you mean,” said the elder man, curtly. “Is the foreman of the joiners on the Nan-Shan outside? . . . Come in, Bates. How is it that you let Tait’s people put us off with a defective lock on the cabin door? The Captain could see directly he set eye on it. Have it replaced at once. The little straws, Bates . . . the little straws. . . .”

The lock was replaced accordingly, and a few days afterwards the Nan-Shan steamed out to the East, without MacWhirr having offered any further remark as to her fittings, or having been heard to utter a single word hinting at pride in his ship, gratitude for his appointment, or satisfaction at his prospects.

With a temperament neither loquacious nor taciturn he found very little occasion to talk. There were matters of duty, of course — directions, orders, and so on; but the past being to his mind done with, and the future not there yet, the more general actualities of the day required no comment — because facts can speak for themselves with overwhelming precision.

Old Mr. Sigg liked a man of few words, and one that “you could be sure would not try to improve upon his instructions.” MacWhirr satisfying these requirements, was continued in command of the Nan-Shan, and applied himself to the careful navigation of his ship in the China seas. She had come out on a British register, but after some time Messrs. Sigg judged it expedient to transfer her to the Siamese flag.

At the news of the contemplated transfer Jukes grew restless, as if under a sense of personal affront. He went about grumbling to himself, and uttering short scornful laughs. “Fancy having a ridiculous Noah’s Ark elephant in the ensign of one’s ship,” he said once at the engine-room door. “Dash me if I can stand it: I’ll throw up the billet. Don’t it make you sick, Mr. Rout?” The chief engineer only cleared his throat with the air of a man who knows the value of a good billet.

The first morning the new flag floated over the stern of the Nan-Shan Jukes stood looking at it bitterly from the bridge. He struggled with his feelings for a while, and then remarked, “Queer flag for a man to sail under, sir.”

“What’s the matter with the flag?” inquired Captain MacWhirr. “Seems all right to me.” And he walked across to the end of the bridge to have a good look.

“Well, it looks queer to me,” burst out Jukes, greatly exasperated, and flung off the bridge.

Captain MacWhirr was amazed at these manners. After a while he stepped quietly into the chart-room, and opened his International Signal Code-book at the plate where the flags of all the nations are correctly figured in gaudy rows. He ran his finger over them, and when he came to Siam he contemplated with great attention the red field and the white elephant. Nothing could be more simple; but to make sure he brought the book out on the bridge for the purpose of comparing the coloured drawing with the real thing at the flagstaff astern. When next Jukes, who was carrying on the duty that day with a sort of suppressed fierceness, happened on the bridge, his commander observed:

“There’s nothing amiss with that flag.”

“Isn’t there?” mumbled Jukes, falling on his knees before a deck-locker and jerking therefrom viciously a spare lead-line.

“No. I looked up the book. Length twice the breadth and the elephant exactly in the middle. I thought the people ashore would know how to make the local flag. Stands to reason. You were wrong, Jukes. . . .”

“Well, sir,” began Jukes, getting up excitedly, “all I can say — ” He fumbled for the end of the coil of line with trembling hands.

“That’s all right.” Captain MacWhirr soothed him, sitting heavily on a little canvas folding-stool he greatly affected. “All you have to do is to take care they don’t hoist the elephant upside-down before they get quite used to it.”

Jukes flung the new lead-line over on the fore-deck with a loud “Here you are, bo’ss’en — don’t forget to wet it thoroughly,” and turned with immense resolution towards his commander; but Captain MacWhirr spread his elbows on the bridge-rail comfortably.

“Because it would be, I suppose, understood as a signal of distress,” he went on. “What do you think? That elephant there, I take it, stands for something in the nature of the Union Jack in the flag. . . .”

“Does it!” yelled Jukes, so that every head on the Nan-Shan’s decks looked towards the bridge. Then he sighed, and with sudden resignation: “It would certainly be a dam’ distressful sight,” he said, meekly.

Later in the day he accosted the chief engineer with a confidential, “Here, let me tell you the old man’s latest.”

Mr. Solomon Rout (frequently alluded to as Long Sol, Old Sol, or Father Rout), from finding himself almost invariably the tallest man on board every ship he joined, had acquired the habit of a stooping, leisurely condescension. His hair was scant and sandy, his flat cheeks were pale, his bony wrists and long scholarly hands were pale, too, as though he had lived all his life in the shade.

He smiled from on high at Jukes, and went on smoking and glancing about quietly, in the manner of a kind uncle lending an ear to the tale of an excited schoolboy. Then, greatly amused but impassive, he asked:

“And did you throw up the billet?”

“No,” cried Jukes, raising a weary, discouraged voice above the harsh buzz of the Nan-Shan’s friction winches. All of them were hard at work, snatching slings of cargo, high up, to the end of long derricks, only, as it seemed, to let them rip down recklessly by the run. The cargo chains groaned in the gins, clinked on coamings, rattled over the side; and the whole ship quivered, with her long gray flanks smoking in wreaths of steam. “No,” cried Jukes, “I didn’t. What’s the good? I might just as well fling my resignation at this bulkhead. I don’t believe you can make a man like that understand anything. He simply knocks me over.”

At that moment Captain MacWhirr, back from the shore, crossed the deck, umbrella in hand, escorted by a mournful, self-possessed Chinaman, walking behind in paper-soled silk shoes, and who also carried an umbrella.

The master of the Nan-Shan, speaking just audibly and gazing at his boots as his manner was, remarked that it would be necessary to call at Fu-chau this trip, and desired Mr. Rout to have steam up to-morrow afternoon at one o’clock sharp. He pushed back his hat to wipe his forehead, observing at the same time that he hated going ashore anyhow; while overtopping him Mr. Rout, without deigning a word, smoked austerely, nursing his right elbow in the palm of his left hand. Then Jukes was directed in the same subdued voice to keep the forward ‘tween-deck clear of cargo. Two hundred coolies were going to be put down there. The Bun Hin Company were sending that lot home. Twenty-five bags of rice would be coming off in a sampan directly, for stores. All seven-years’-men they were, said Captain MacWhirr, with a camphor-wood chest to every man. The carpenter should be set to work nailing three-inch battens along the deck below, fore and aft, to keep these boxes from shifting in a sea-way. Jukes had better look to it at once. “D’ye hear, Jukes?” This chinaman here was coming with the ship as far as Fu-chau — a sort of interpreter he would be. Bun Hin’s clerk he was, and wanted to have a look at the space. Jukes had better take him forward. “D’ye hear, Jukes?”

Jukes took care to punctuate these instructions in proper places with the obligatory “Yes, sir,” ejaculated without enthusiasm. His brusque “Come along, John; make look see” set the Chinaman in motion at his heels.

“Wanchee look see, all same look see can do,” said Jukes, who having no talent for foreign languages mangled the very pidgin-English cruelly. He pointed at the open hatch. “Catchee number one piecie place to sleep in. Eh?”

He was gruff, as became his racial superiority, but not unfriendly. The Chinaman, gazing sad and speechless into the darkness of the hatchway, seemed to stand at the head of a yawning grave.

“No catchee rain down there — savee?” pointed out Jukes. “Suppose all’ee same fine weather, one piecie coolie-man come topside,” he pursued, warming up imaginatively. “Make so — Phooooo!” He expanded his chest and blew out his cheeks. “Savee, John? Breathe — fresh air. Good. Eh? Washee him piecie pants, chow-chow top-side — see, John?”

With his mouth and hands he made exuberant motions of eating rice and washing clothes; and the Chinaman, who concealed his distrust of this pantomime under a collected demeanour tinged by a gentle and refined melancholy, glanced out of his almond eyes from Jukes to the hatch and back again. “Velly good,” he murmured, in a disconsolate undertone, and hastened smoothly along the decks, dodging obstacles in his course. He disappeared, ducking low under a sling of ten dirty gunny-bags full of some costly merchandise and exhaling a repulsive smell.

Captain MacWhirr meantime had gone on the bridge, and into the chart-room, where a letter, commenced two days before, awaited termination. These long letters began with the words, “My darling wife,” and the steward, between the scrubbing of the floors and the dusting of chronometer-boxes, snatched at every opportunity to read them. They interested him much more than they possibly could the woman for whose eye they were intended; and this for the reason that they related in minute detail each successive trip of the Nan-Shan.

Her master, faithful to facts, which alone his consciousness reflected, would set them down with painstaking care upon many pages. The house in a northern suburb to which these pages were addressed had a bit of garden before the bow-windows, a deep porch of good appearance, coloured glass with imitation lead frame in the front door. He paid five-and-forty pounds a year for it, and did not think the rent too high, because Mrs. MacWhirr (a pretentious person with a scraggy neck and a disdainful manner) was admittedly ladylike, and in the neighbourhood considered as “quite superior.” The only secret of her life was her abject terror of the time when her husband would come home to stay for good. Under the same roof there dwelt also a daughter called Lydia and a son, Tom. These two were but slightly acquainted with their father. Mainly, they knew him as a rare but privileged visitor, who of an evening smoked his pipe in the dining-room and slept in the house. The lanky girl, upon the whole, was rather ashamed of him; the boy was frankly and utterly indifferent in a straightforward, delightful, unaffected way manly boys have.

And Captain MacWhirr wrote home from the coast of China twelve times every year, desiring quaintly to be “remembered to the children,” and subscribing himself “your loving husband,” as calmly as if the words so long used by so many men were, apart from their shape, worn-out things, and of a faded meaning.

The China seas north and south are narrow seas. They are seas full of every-day, eloquent facts, such as islands, sand-banks, reefs, swift and changeable currents — tangled facts that nevertheless speak to a seaman in clear and definite language. Their speech appealed to Captain MacWhirr’s sense of realities so forcibly that he had given up his state-room below and practically lived all his days on the bridge of his ship, often having his meals sent up, and sleeping at night in the chart-room. And he indited there his home letters. Each of them, without exception, contained the phrase, “The weather has been very fine this trip,” or some other form of a statement to that effect. And this statement, too, in its wonderful persistence, was of the same perfect accuracy as all the others they contained.

Mr. Rout likewise wrote letters; only no one on board knew how chatty he could be pen in hand, because the chief engineer had enough imagination to keep his desk locked. His wife relished his style greatly. They were a childless couple, and Mrs. Rout, a big, high-bosomed, jolly woman of forty, shared with Mr. Rout’s toothless and venerable mother a little cottage near Teddington. She would run over her correspondence, at breakfast, with lively eyes, and scream out interesting passages in a joyous voice at the deaf old lady, prefacing each extract by the warning shout, “Solomon says!” She had the trick of firing off Solomon’s utterances also upon strangers, astonishing them easily by the unfamiliar text and the unexpectedly jocular vein of these quotations. On the day the new curate called for the first time at the cottage, she found occasion to remark, “As Solomon says: ‘the engineers that go down to the sea in ships behold the wonders of sailor nature’;” when a change in the visitor’s countenance made her stop and stare.

“Solomon. . . . Oh! . . . Mrs. Rout,” stuttered the young man, very red in the face, “I must say . . . I don’t. . . .”

“He’s my husband,” she announced in a great shout, throwing herself back in the chair. Perceiving the joke, she laughed immoderately with a handkerchief to her eyes, while he sat wearing a forced smile, and, from his inexperience of jolly women, fully persuaded that she must be deplorably insane. They were excellent friends afterwards; for, absolving her from irreverent intention, he came to think she was a very worthy person indeed; and he learned in time to receive without flinching other scraps of Solomon’s wisdom.